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The foaming at the mouth conservatives and trolls will not handle the truth:

“I think there’s a cultural problem within the Republican Party that’s beyond fixing. I think the leadership of the Republican Party is so out of touch with life in America today that I just decided that it’s not worth fixing. I don’t think they can win a national election again. Pull the plug on the patient, the party’s brain dead.”

“As Edward Snowden prepares to defend himself in a worldwide webinar Thursday, the Justice Department is accusing the private contractor that vetted him and thousands of other intelligence workers of bilking U.S. taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars by conducting phony background checks.

“USIS, the giant private contractor that conducted the background checks of both Snowden and Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis, is accused in a Justice Department lawsuit filed Wednesday night of conducting 665,000 fake background checks between 2008 and 2012.”

Creating Tastier and Healthier Fruits and Veggies with a Modern Alternative to GMOs

If a particular habanero’s juices indicated that it was relatively mild, they bit into it like an apple. Some of the peppers were smoky; others astringent. Some tasted faintly of sausage; others had the foul funk of gym socks. But the most interesting peppers by far possessed all the complex aroma and flavor of a habanero, yet none of its heat.

@2. That a staggering level of incompetence. Where is the outrage? Will the goverment pull all funding from them. I assume they will now declare bankruptcy and be be bought out by their parent company free and clear of any lawsuits?

Roger Rabbit Commentary: What’s really interesting about this story is the city’s contract with the camera contractor basically says, “If our cameras are faulty and issue wrongful tickets to motorists, you can’t tell the public about it.” That’s what public-private cooperative ventures look like, circa 2014. If you ask me, government services like traffic enforcement work a lot better if you just let public employees do it, and kick the greedy and dishonest private contractors out of the picture entirely.

A new Pew survey shows only one-third of Americans believe working hard will make you rich, while two-thirds believe the rich get that way through advantages the rest of us don’t have. “Most also feel the system unfairly benefits the wealthy.”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: This survey’s results clearly break along partisan lines. About one-third of Americans are hard-core Republicans — almost all of them younger white male wannabes plus a smattering of older white male I’ve-got-mines. Convincing themselves that people are poor because they’re lazy and immoral is essential to their belief system, because the key to their personal plan for getting rich is owning a business and paying shitty wages to their employees. They can’t achieve their goals by sharing the fruits of their employees’ labor with the employees, it’s as simple as that. To these people, sharing the wealth created by workers with the workers who create that wealth is “socialism.”

@2, @5, @7 Or….it’s an after-the-fact ladling of plausible deniability on a lot of high-level butts. How many of us have considered the possiblity that Snowden isn’t what he purports to be? There are all sorts of entities with a vested interest in getting all of us common folks’ britches in a bunch over the NSA watching our every move…including the NSA itself.

Clever industrial robots can quickly “learn” a set of human actions. Services may be even more vulnerable. Computers can already detect intruders in a closed-circuit camera picture more reliably than a human can. By comparing reams of financial or biometric data, they can often diagnose fraud or illness more accurately than any number of accountants or doctors.One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades. http://www.economist.com/news/.....ntry-ready

Automation is going to continue to kill jobs. When it is cheaper to have a machine handling repetitive tasks, the jobs will go away. Machines are more reliable in repetitive tasks, complain less, and play no politics. They can also work around the clocks with minimal transition/break.

In 10 years I wonder how the “I got mine, Fuck You” crowd is going handle being unemployed with the people they despised 10 years before.

Do you think this comment is accurate?

The lesson is that when we hit one of these big transitions, there will be a big group of economic losers who will lose their economic usefulness and never regain it. Their children will be able to find useful work if they adapt well enough, but not the middle-aged. Their loss of economic usefulness will be reflected in lower median wages and wealth and a smaller share of profits going to labor. Governments will need to care for these angry and frustrated citizens, but they are likely to not regain their earning power. This suggests the need for a strong social safety net.

The faster the transition happens, the shorter the pain. Do nothing to impede investment, even if it will result in job loss. Do nothing to impede trade. Whoever makes it through the transition first wins the next century, so open the economy. Speed and pain now will lead to prosperity later.

I worry about this concept.As time passes greater and greater percentage of the working population for one reason or another, principally automation of tasks formerly done by people, are not only unemployed but unemployable.

@11 No question about it. The Economist had a cover story on it last week. Tax software can replace accountants, and document search software can replace platoons of lawyers. It’s conceivable that someday the economy may not need human workers, except for a few technicians to maintain the robots. Who will get the robots’ economic output? Under capitalism, the owners of the robots. Under socialism, everyone. Not hard to figure out where automation will take us when a few people own everything and everyone else is starving.

I used to know a middle-aged black guy who had a great IT job at WaMu. I wonder where he is and what he’s doing now? Maybe he’s one of the millions of people living on extended unemployment benefits whom Republicans want to chop off at the knees?

Problem for O’Keefe and Veritas, they got caught so many times only brain challenged mouth frothers who won’t vote for Wendy Davis anyway believe him. So OF COURSE Piddles thinks it will matters, see brain challenged mouth frothers.

The main problem with the current Corporation-friendly post-Citizens United political landscape, is now the average citizen, the real power behind the throne (constitutionally speaking) now is excluded entirely from the system. The average Joe can’t get a word in edgewise, and is often subjected to the violent forces that are usually directed at real lawbreakers. Outright flouting of the Law is now so commonplace, we’d have to build a thousand new prisons to house all the criminals on Wall Street and Washington D.C.

They don’t give a damn about the law. Nothing is forbidden, nothing is truly unethical as far as they are concerned. They can commit every crime we have a law for, and they just don’t have to give a rats ass about any of it. The law has no effect whatsoever on their lifestyles or their ambitions to Power and wealth, even at the expense of everything this Nation was founded and built upon.

I really hope he gets Prison time. Real Time. Like 10 years in Sing Sing or Coxsackie and forfeiture of every nickel he has.

Fuck these guys. Time to stop coddling them and treating them like wayward children.

I just had a thought about Ol’ Mike Huckabee. It occurres to me that, in the light of his opinion about Womens Libido, that perhaps it is because he’s never, ever met a woman who actually likes to fuck him. His primary reference in the matter of course, would be his wife. Perhaps she controls her libido so well that she won’t even let him touch her.

@22 In California, cop violence is so out of control that now cops are killing cops in that state. By accident, of course, just like they kill innocent citizens by accident. (You know, the senior citizen with the TV remote control …)

John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil USA from 2005 – 2008, describes the corporate political donation system as “extortion.”

“I feel extorted,” John Hofmeister told CNN’s Drew Griffin. “Every time I wrote a check I felt that it was a form of extortion, the price of entry, because of the reception that you got when you contributed versus the reception when you did not contribute.”

If one has a few tens of millions in cash, and an inclination to retire and spend the rest of ones days fucking around, smoking dope, drinking beer, barbecuing, playing with a private steam railroad and walking around in ones underwear, it’s perfect.

Interesting article on a lesser known vehicle in San Francisco MUNI’s F-Market and Wharves line fleet. It’s a former Belgian PCC, a little different than what San Francisco used before and continues to use.http://www.streetcar.org/blog/.....pring.html

Speaking of jail, anyone know the odds on ex governor McDonnell and wife going to jail? Last I heard there was something like 14 felony charges. Something about all sorts of corruption. No wonder McDonnell was an up and coming RETHUG super star of PAYGO. (You PAY me money and you GO do what you want.)

Huckabee is a flip floper. what a surprise. I guess he was for it, until a black democrat got elected.

Before Republican talk show host Mike Huckabee considered President Barack Obama’s contraception coverage mandate an insult to women, he had signed a very similar mandate into law while serving as governor of Arkansas.

Huckabee signed state legislation in 2005 that required all health insurance plans providing prescription drug coverage to cover contraceptive drugs and devices as well. According to the Arkansas Times, Huckabee’s exemption for religious organizations was actually narrower than the exemption in the Affordable Care Act:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....59975.html

” …[T]his morning, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that 800,000 people have signed up this month for private health plans though the Obamacare exchanges, bringing the total number to date up to 3 million. … [T]hese latest numbers … show that the number of people signing up is beginning to catch up to the projections made before the September 1 rollout …. [I]t no longer seems inconceivable that 7 million could sign up by March 31st, as the CBO had originally projected.”

@44 Seems like a total non-story to me, putz. Explain how this is important enough to be worth 60 seconds of my time.

Boy Roger DUMBASS is a dumb ASS.

It DUMMOCRETINS who claim to be compassionate in the conversations about others. Then you watch the video and you immediately note DUMMOCRETINS are really scumbags. These Wendy Davis jock straps ridicule her wheel chair opponent with other comments like “Stand with Wendy Davis”.

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